Film resurrects champ but takes punch at journalism

This will not be a movie review. That would take me way out of my element.

Instead, it's a journalism review. Hey, no wisecracks.

I saw "Resurrecting the Champ" last week, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett. Part of its allure is that it combines two of my favorite subjects -- boxing and the newspaper business.

The main reason, though, is that the movie sprung from a Los Angeles Times Magazine story written by J.R. Moehringer, a colleague in the Orange County office while he worked on the story 10 years ago.

Pretty cool to have your story become a movie. That's probably what Moehringer once told himself.

On second thought. . . .

The screen version features Hartnett as a Denver sportswriter who meets a homeless man claiming to be a former ranked heavyweight contender. That's a story in anybody's newspaper, and it's the one Moehringer pursued with gusto when he met his down-and-out subject in a Santa Ana park.

In the movie version, Hartnett's story dazzles everyone until, oops, it's discovered not long after that the guy isn't really who he said he is.

And so we get a movie that beats up the newspaper business for being so hot for a story that it doesn't bother to check things out.

The reporter is reduced to a bum in his own right who, even after learning the truth, is reluctant to publicly acknowledge it. He's not only lazy; he's unethical.

I kept thinking, Moehringer must have been perfectly thrilled at the filmmakers' telling the world that the movie was inspired by his story.

It might make me wince, but I could handle a story about a wayward reporter. "Shattered Glass" did it very well. The Jayson Blair story is still out there to be told about the New York Times reporter with a propensity to invent things.

That's why "Champ" is so irksome -- in real life, the reality was exactly the opposite of what the movie depicts.

Rather than running with the story, as would be the temptation, Moehringer put so much time into it that he eventually learned -- to his great distress -- that the guy posing as former contender Bob Satterfield really wasn't him.

I remember us talking in the office when he learned the truth. He acted as though the world had come to an end. All that time spent on the story, he lamented, for naught. He assumed the story was dead; I suggested he write a saga for a national magazine and describe how he'd been duped.